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TechMeme's got huge gender biases, and this helps contribute to the echo chamber effect that Fred's talking about. In September 2010 I wrote about a case where
by jdp23 16y ago
TechMeme's got huge gender biases, and this helps contribute to the echo chamber effect that Fred's talking about. In September 2010 I wrote about a case where even though 65% of the articles on a subject were written by women, TechMeme's version had on 16.5% by women. http://www.talesfromthe.net/jon/?p=1618#comment-88992 http://www.talesfromthe.net/jon/?p=1618#comment-88992
- albedoa 16y agoArgh, blocked at work. How was the 65% rate determined? And was TechMeme's 16.5% rate compared to any other sites? If that's all explained in your article, then I'll just read it later :)
- jokermatt999 16y agoCopy pasted for convenience. Will delete later if it's distracting. _____ The coverage of the Arrington kerfuffle provides some great examples of a form of structural bias against women that most people overlook. At this point about 65% of the posts I’ve linked to above are by women (31/47, I think). Here’s TechMeme’s summary of the debate: five guys and Shira 16.6% women. In a comment on Gender, race, age and power in online discussions, chapter n back in 2008, I talked about representation issues on Techmeme: the majority of these blogs are generally what Susan C. Herring et. al. refer to in Women and children last: the discursive construction of Weblogs as “filter blogs”, commenting on external events, as opposed to “personal journals” or “knowledge blogs”; TechMeme’s technology is a natural for filter blogs, so it’s unsurprising that this leads to underrepresentation of women and youth. It’s nice to have such a clear example! At the risk of being pedantic,there are a couple of important lessons here: - The “neutral” algorithms of sites like Techmeme, memeorandum, and mediagazer are in practice heavily biased against women, and so present yet another challenge for women in general — and women in technology, politics, and media in particular - If you’re getting a large chunk of your news via Techmeme, you’re getting a very male view of reality
- jdp23 16y agoThanks to jokermatt999 for the cut-and-paste. Yes, later in that thread there's data from Google and Bing -- both in the 45-50% range. EDIT: Also, here's the link to the Susan Herring et. al. paper I mentioned "Women and Children Last: The Discursive Construction of Weblogs" http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/women_and_children.html http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/women_and_children.html
- shasta 16y agoWait, 65% of the stories you linked to were written by women, while only 45%-50% of stories at large were written by women? Have you tried to examine the roots of your gender bias?
- jdp23 16y agoYou've misunderstood. There were 47 stories. 31 (65%) were by women. TechMeme highlighted 6. 1 was by women, 16%. Google's front page had 4/9 women. (44%) Bing's front page had 5/10. (50%)
- shasta 16y agoSorry, I still don't understand. When you say there were 47 stories, where did you get that list and how do you know it's comprehensive?
- jdp23 16y agoI got the list by watching twitter, following links, googling, binging. It probably isn't comprehensive but is a superset of the other lists.
- khafra 16y agoIf I'm reading joker's summary of your argument correctly, you're saying that techmeme disproportionately covers blogs about tech news instead of blogs people write about their own lives or about generalized, uncontroversial knowledge; which makes it biased against women? The biasing in this case seems almost an epiphenomenon; TC tries to focus on certain views of certain subjects and succeeds; whether those views are disproportionately written by men has little to do with anything.
- brandnewlow 16y agoJon, this seems like a silly fight to pick. Techmeme simply surfaces the hottest content from tech blogs that's getting linked/tweeted right now. It is descriptive, not editorial. If you notice that only 16% of women are being shown covering a story, then your takeaway should be "gosh, only 16% of women wrote interesting posts that are getting linked to on the web" rather than "gosh, techmeme is descriminating against women." Techmeme just calls it like it sees it. It's awesome in that way.
- jdp23 16y agoTechmeme's definition of "interesting" is "selected by an algorithm that starts with hubs that Gabe says are interesting". If 65% of the stories are written by women, and only 16% of Techmeme's stories are, then Gabe's algorithm finds women a lot less interesting than men. If you agree, then yeah, Techmeme's awesome. If you don't agree, then you need to be conscious that Techmeme's presenting you a skewed view of the world. Unless you're actively working to balance it with sources skewed in the other direction then it's going to mean that your overall information sources aren't giving you an accurate picture of reality.
- brandnewlow 16y agoIf you looked at the top 5 Google results across all key words and men wrote more of the posts than women, would you accuse Google of bias? Or would you consider that maybe its evidence there are more men writing on the web than women. I don't see a difference here. Gabe's said that his system adds new sources programmatically as they get linked to. Why on earth would he block out female voices?
- jdp23 16y agoIt depends on how much more. Women write roughly as much as men in the blogosphere, so if the overall results were (say) 75% male it would indicate a bias. The times I've looked at Techmeme and memeorandum they're usually 80-90% male. I don't know why Gabe blocks out female voices but from the Atlantic article linked to in my thread he doesn't seem to read any women regularly so my guess is that he either (a) doesn't know he's doing it or (b) doesn't care.
- mkramlich 16y agoreality has a huge well-known gender bias. HN is a subset of reality.
- talbina 16y agoThat's interesting, but did you know that Gabe Riveria, founder of Techmeme, is dating Alexia Tsotsis, a prominent writer from TechCrunch? Just a thought.